Show HN: Explore doctors' disciplinary history

This may be a character flaw on my part, but I’d be a little bit worried or at least curious about a doctor who’s had a lot of arbitration cases relative to their career length, even if they’ve won them.

Thank you. Here [1] is the source for one, which states "An arbitration award is a payment for damages and does not necessarily reflect that the physician's medical competence is below the standard of care. The Medical Board reviews all such reported arbitration awards and action is taken only if it is determined that a violation of the Medical Practice Act occurred. The Medical Board is prohibited by law from releasing a copy of the arbitration award report or any other information concerning the award." I am still unsure if that means the award was in the doctor's or patient's favor, and because the report is secret, it may not be possible to find out, but please let me know if you know how I could find out.

I also want to mention that patients are forced into arbitration via the contract for service they initially sign [2] that many don't read (whether due their inability to understand it or time constraints on needing immediate care and limited availability of doctors). However, I think it's a shady practice that hurts patients [3] and it would be worth keeping the data showing doctors taking advantage of it regardless. The main excerpt from the article supporting my thoughts is "Doctors’ attorneys are more likely to develop relationships with the arbitrators, they say, who, in turn, may give the plaintiff only a token award to get continued business from doctors."

[1] https://search.dca.ca.gov/details/8002/G/77959/9df8d122bd5b5...

[2] https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2007/ccp/1295.html

[3] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-24-he-22804...

It never ceases to astound me, especially since these are the most well regarded members of our society with more education than anyone else.

On another note, there are some really interesting ones like this one [1] starting on page 9 which reads like crime novel.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230926165052/https://www2.mbc....

I also partially read a random one [0], about a doctor who had his license revoked for 3 years. Tearing a patient's nerve because he lost a tool and other worse cases (page 17)

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20230925064351/https://www2.mbc....

Here's a quote from one I randomly clicked on:

>Respondent admits that there were billings for 35 treatments apiece for two undercover law enforcement officers when each had only five visits. Further, he acknowledged that had he known the true facts, he would have investigated further. However, had he been vigilant, respondent does not believe that he would have detected the problem because patient signatures, as evidence that the patient received treatment, were forged after he issued his reports.

I didn't realize that undercover agents were/are doing sting operations for insurance fraud. (And I don't understand the part about forged signatures...)

It's not just incompetence. Many of these people also abuse their patients. They know what they're doing. They know they have all the power.

I noticed when zooming in on the map, the light blue color is almost identical to what the map shows as lakes/ponds/water etc.

Thank you. I'll fix asap. The data source only gives me the names as complete names in "last, first middle" format, and I didn't want to take risk parsing them since there are inconsistencies, but I'll work it out. For now, I've clarified the format in the placeholder of that field.

Thank you.

1. Fixed

2. Do you think this is because the URL stores the filter params, so every time you change a filter it's a new address? Do you have any examples of similar sites and how they behave? I can change this if it's not standard.

Thank you. This data should be available in all states, but each state has a proprietary site I have to write a new scraper for and write a new data pipeline for. I'm thinking about open-sourcing the project and gathering community support for the rest now that I have a good pattern set.

Yes, I was harmed by a doctor and the medical board dismissed my complaint. This made me curious about what the board actually does take action for, but this wasn't searchable because all that was available were PDF scans that weren't digitized/OCR'd. I also noticed some documents that were referenced in doctors' profiles had disappeared. As part of this, I archived every PDF available on the wayback machine to protect against that going forward.

I also want to give credit to a similar site that I took inspiration from called 4patientsafety.org, which did some of the same stuff I have here, but completely manually. I chatted with the creator of that and he agreed making an automated version would help because they fell behind updating it due to how intensive the manual process was.

In Washington, this information can be gleaned on a small scale from the Department of Health's Provider Credential Search - https://doh.wa.gov/licenses-permits-and-certificates/provide...

And the higher volume Open Data Portal dataset: https://data.wa.gov/Health/Health-Care-Provider-Credential-D...

There is movement on the price/cost front. I found one tool that provides this data in a more searchable way (turquoise.health) and used it with limited success. I believe the upstream data is public as well, but cant remember the name of the repository OTOH.

So sorry that happened to you too. Thank you for signing the petition—I hope that would obviate the need for this site altogether.

With all the data protection laws doctors over there use as a shield, would it even be possible?

Thank you! I too had no idea it existed before it happened to me.

Thank you. I agree that even though in the US this stuff is not as available as it could be, it still beats most of the world. That's why I think allowing for patients to report the information is so important. I've taken the first step toward that by enabling comments on each doctor's profile.

From the other comments it doesn't look like the data source is machine readable. It looks like there's automated OCR of PDFs. A similar project was doing the same but with human labor

"—more states coming soon" ;) No state publishes this depth of data machine readable. u/cobertos covered the rest in their reply.

I marked the map feature beta because I noticed the geocoding wasn't accurate for all addresses. I'll get on that. I'm hesitant to just exclude ones not in the US though because it's possible a doctor has a California license while primarily practicing in another country, just like that case.

It's fuzzy search, so the most relevant ones should be ordered correctly. I can certainly tune the threshold to not keep less relevant ones.

Thank you for the recommendation. I plan to enable geo-filtering via the map. I'll need to figure out what is the best granularity to do so at—maybe county. I might be able to give an option for the granularity too.

We've got Florida now too!